Tag: Brentford

As a result of having a contract with the Football League to show highlights, broadcasters used to have to give a little starring space to the lower divisions. Both the BBC and ITV were obliged to show a handful of lower division matches per season, giving them star billing over and above what was happening at the top of the First Division. For Football League clubs, this meant that they would usually end up on the television once a season, as the local television broadcasters looked around to fill a contractual for the season, even if that one did...

Apparently, last Saturday, I and hundreds of others went on a hooligan rampage and “destroyed” the West London suburb of Brentford, while attending a pre-season ‘friendly’ between weakened sides from Brentford’s League One club and current Scottish champions, Celtic.

We continue this afternoon with some archive matches from League One, with West Londons Brentford. The Bees are remarkably well served on YouTube, with an excellent archive of matches available on this outstanding website. We have highlights from three matches followed by a round-up of an FA Cup run, kicking off all the way back to 1942 and the London War Cup final at Wembley against Portsmouth. We then have two matches from each end of the 1970s – when television companies had to feature some matches from the lower divisions each season for contractual reasons – starting with a home match against Aldershot from August 1971, and followed with another home match from 1979 against Watford. Finally, we have a round-up of the clubs FA Cup run from the 1988/89 season, when they reached the quarter-finals of the competition and faced a daunting trip to Anfield to play Liverpool. You can follow Twohundredpercent on Twitter by clicking...

If the Premier League is now, for many, something approaching the ultimate footballing experience, there is probably something to be said for the argument that, in its quest for purity, quality, our game has lost something. The idiosyncracies of football at or near the top have been whitewashed out of sight over time, to be replaced by a scrubbed up and sanitised version of what we might call The British Football Experience. This is not only true at the top end of the game. The prediliction of smallers clubs to leave their ancestral homes for identikit stadia (for these, in spite of their modest proportions, lean more closely towards being “stadia” rather than “grounds” – or, at least, that is how they wish to be perceived) has been one of the defining characteristics of lower league football over the last two decades or so. It’s a selfish pleasure, for sure – after all, it fails to take into account the match day comfort of those that are its regular visitors – but there remains something aesthetically pleasing about Exeter City’s St James Park. The line of houses that run a third the length of the touchline on one side of the pitch with people hanging out of the windows enjoying the free view, the small open terrace for away supporters away to the left, the red and white chequered...

Had most people in Britain cupped their ears in a southwardly direction at just before five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, they would have heard the faint sound of cheering coming from the Withdean stadium in Brighton. In the midst of a desperate, crazy goalmouth scramble, six minutes into injury time at the end of a match between Brighton & Hove Albion and Oldham Athletic which was deadlocked at 1-1, Francisco Sandaza, whose previous career exploits had seen him play for Valencia’s ‘B’ team and Dundee United, bundled the ball over the line to win the match for Brighton and send the Seagulls to the top of the League One table. It was a goal that was late enough for the BBC’s website to have already reported that Peterborough United had gone to the top of the table with their win which had finished a couple of minutes earlier, but Sandaza’s last-gasp intervention marked a new crowning moment in a season that is starting to exceed all expectations for Brighton supporters. The story of Brighton’s rise to the top of League One started in April 2009 when, against all odds, they won five of their last seven matches under Russell Slade to stay in the division against what had appeared to be insurmountable odds. A disappointing start to last season saw Slade lose his job, but his replacement, Gustavo Poyet,...